MIA recovery team on WWII mission

‘Bring everyone home’ motto still resonates

“I think that goes toward answering, ‘Well, you'll never get finished so why bother to start at all?’ ” said Andrew Tyrrell, the other anthropologist working in the cow pasture. “It's not necessarily all about finishing. While it's important to have that as an ultimate goal, what's also important is that the stories of all of these people get remembered.”

The Pentagon would not reveal the name of the lost pilot because his relatives were unaware of the search, Webb said, and there were concerns about getting their hopes up. If any remains are identified — in many cases through advances in DNA testing that extract samples from shards of bone — the family will be contacted and the pilot will be given a full military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.

For now, the Defense Department will say only that the pilot died in a Martin B-26 Marauder on a terrible day for the Allies. The plane was on its way from a base in France to bomb a viaduct in the German town of Ahrweiler, but was ambushed and never reached its target. Six were on board: two crew members who parachuted out and were captured by the Germans and released after the war; and four who died in the crash. Three bodies were recovered. The plane was one of 39 B-26s lost in the area on that day alone. In all, an estimated 19,000 Americans died during the six-week Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, the bloodiest fighting of the war.

The military team has been searching the pasture since early August and is to remain until mid-September. The area is surrounded by wooded hills and volcanic lakes in an idyllic hiking region on the border with Luxembourg, but team members spend their days pouring buckets of thick mud onto quarter-inch screens, then hosing them down to catch their finds: molten bits of aircraft, a piece of a boot, hundreds of .50-caliber bullets for the plane's 11 machine guns.

At sites in the Pacific, some have found family photographs and wedding rings.

The work is monotonous, but members of the team, who have had multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and expect in many cases to return there, say they have developed a kinship with the pilot they never knew.

“It's the same family essentially going back for our own,” said Capt. Melissa Ova, the team leader, who served in Iraq in 2007.

At times the work is maddeningly slow. But to Ova the frustrations are worth it.

“For me, it's a comfort to know that if something happens, somebody will come get me, eventually,” she said.